Intel Matrix RAID metadata messed up by geom

[Benny Goemans]

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this is the best place to send to, if no answer I'll try 
other mailing lists.

First some background:

I'm running 2 rather big raid (well, software raid) arrays, one RAID 0 
and one RAID 5. Up to now this didn't pose much problems, aside from the 
occasional rebuilding for which I needed to boot my fallback windows OS. 
I was happy with this, but since I'm lagging behind this much in version 
(8- will soon disappear) I assumed that I could at least try upgrading 
to 10 and see what happens. So, I did:

* used freebsd-update to get updates, merge and install
* rebooted into BSD 10 kernel
* I see messages from GEOM passing by, noticing my raid arrays
* I get warnings about read-only filesystems and I realise that geom 
doesn't support writing to ICH RAID 5 arrays (which I read when I wanted 
to upgrade to 9, but seemed to have forgotten)

I figure, no harm done, I'll just boot a 8.4 disk and reinstall the 
kernel. So I reboot ... only to find out that my drives show up as 
INCOMPATIBLE in the ICH configuration utility. I'm assuming that GEOM 
decided to overwrite critical metadata with a version that my 
motherboard doesn't support.
I never ran any geom tools, never saw a warning in the boot which would 
have prompted me to abort. It just did.

So, I have two questions:
1a) isn't this a bug? I'm assuming that GEOM shouldn't at least 
overwrite metadata without allowing the user to abort, especially not 
with a newer version that might not be supported anymore
1b) does this also happen when booting the live cd?
2) is there anyone out there who can help me get this meta data back to 
a version my mainboard supports? I really need this system up and 
running again (as it's my main pc) without having to reinstall 
everything, which would take ages. I do have backups of most critical 
data, but I'd still like to have to non/less-critical data as well.

Some extra info:
mainboard: Asus P5WDG 2 WS, with latest (official) 0805 bios
ICH: 5.1.2, ICH7R

I can boot the system with a BSD 10 memdisk and access the data on the 
BSD partitions, so it's not gone. For the ntfs partitions I'm still 
looking for a solution, but as I said I'd rather get the system up and 
running again than try to backup everything that I need and rebuild. The 
risk that I'm forgetting something is simply too big.

Kind regards,
Benny Goemans